


Foxfire

by awesometinyhumanbeing



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Happy Ending, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Kitsune, Light Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2018-12-29 21:12:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12093534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awesometinyhumanbeing/pseuds/awesometinyhumanbeing
Summary: He's—Yuuri stops.Minedoesn't sound quite right.For me.His eyes are smarting, suddenly. He excuses himself with a mumbled apology, hurries to any place that will hide him away. Vulnerability floods through him, makes him clumsy and sensitive.He's for me,Yuuri thinks, and he's crying, crying, crying.(The forest is Yuuri's home, and thekitsuneare his kin. Victor teaches him what it means to be human.)





	Foxfire

**Author's Note:**

> For reference, the timeline for this was envisioned somewhere in the 20th century. For the ages, Yuuri more or less grows up throughout the timeline, but spends the major portion at 15/16 years. I had to bring their ages closer for the timeline to work, so Victor is at 16/17 years.

_What does it take to feel human?_

Yuuri remembers, with unsettling clarity, the _koryo_ who asked him this—her two-legged form brandished with long limbs and seductive grace, the silken _kimono_ draped over the very edges of her shoulders. She'd been languishing at the base of the holy mountain, too young to be cowed by the thought of the _b_ _yakko_ coming down to chastise her. Her youth hadn't mattered to Yuuri—her years were far, far ahead of his. The fur of her seven tails had glistened in the moonlight, swaying to the same rhythm as the laurel leaves around them. There was a deceptive sort of idleness to her, the way she looked at her clawed fingers with too-bright eyes. He hadn't understood any part of her.

The memory takes him over now like a creeping, vengeful thing. He stands in the middle of a quiet river, swallows, blinks against the dark of the cave, swallows again. Lets awareness take hold of his body and catalogues the places he knows are forever changed. Fingertips tracing over the lines of his palm. The beloved weight in the crook between his neck and left shoulder. Air brushing over his eyelashes, not quite a breath. A touch at his hip, unintended but lingering, helpless. The phantom ache in his thighs. His lips, the heaviest of all. Smoke and honey in his lungs, and they make his throat burn in both relief and agony.

 _What does it take to feel human?_ the memory echoes.

 _This_ , he thinks, and that is all.

* * *

Yuuri's life in the village remains with him only in meager scraps—his mother's frenzied voice, her hands damp and iron-tight around his arms, wet sand under his stumbling feet, the glint of whetted silver, screams muddled with other strange, grotesque sounds. Had he looked down, or behind him, or up at his mother's face, Yuuri's sure he would have remembered the blood just as well.

As it is, his trek through the broadleef forest starkly outstrips everything else in his memory. For a child with hunger bone-deep, with wounds on his feet that would take weeks to heal, with nothing left to him but half a name—the shadows alone had made him afraid and sleepless. When he'd been plucked out from under the giant root of a chinquapin tree during the worst of the thunderstorms, the fur around him had been warm, and that had been enough.

The _kitsune_ of this forest are strange creatures—strange even in their kindness, even in their wisdom. They cover him with their tails in the colder hours, one atop another atop another. They nudge him into hidden caves and shallow rivers, show him why he doesn't have to feel uneasy in feeding on the smaller animals. Sometimes they speak to him, and it is always careful, always hushed. _You can be one of us. You don't have to go back out there. The forest accepts you._ They call him _fae child_. For some reason, he prefers it to his name.

It takes him four years to learn the intricacies of their world, and another three to adopt them into his own. He's seen the leaves shed and re-grow thirteen times before he meets Minako, a _reiko_ who prefers her human form to fox.

She never calls him _fae child_. It's always _clay child_ instead, in her sour-tinged brand of humour.

"You're not made of fire and gold like the rest of us," she says, not unkindly. "Your stuff is sturdier, Yuuri."

She flicks her gaze down to his feet, bandaged now with lamb's-ear leaves. Yuuri resists the urge to shuffle, plants them firmer against the ground instead. The spark of approval in her eyes is a subtle thing, but it feels like a victory over the sting in his soles.

"When your feet heal," she starts, and pauses. Seems lost, suddenly, in the way his feet arch and the jut of his ankle bones. She blinks, and a decisiveness comes over her—and with it, a softness in the way she looks at him. "When your feet heal," she says, and it's more real this time, "I will come to you again." 

* * *

She does. _Kitsune_ seldom feel threatened enough to lie, Yuuri will learn.

By his thirteenth autumn, he's considered a child of the forest. Yuuri wanders away most of his days in a network of caves, guided by the river that runs through them. The surface freezes over in winter; sometimes, he lifts up the layers of silk draped over him by the _kitsune_ and delights in the smooth, numbing feeling of ice under his feet. He sleeps in a hollow carved out from the trunk of the same chinquapin tree, plays with the fireflies and revels in not being afraid. When he wakes up, he explores abandoned shrines and cleans their dust-covered fox statues.

Minako finds him in one such shrine. He almost doesn't recognize her, with the red paint lining her eyes and her hair piled atop her head in intricate weaves.

"Minako-sama," he greets her, because the _yorikata_ always hiss it to him when she passes by.

Her face pulls into a grimace. "I told you not to mind the field foxes. Listen to _me_ , not them."

 _You don't clip me around the ears and call me ungrateful,_ he thinks.

"Are they calling you an idiot fae again?" she says anyway.

Yuuri averts his eyes and raises his shoulders in some combination of a shrug and an uncomfortable squirm.

"Dimwits," she scoffs, casting her eyes in some faraway direction. "You're neither an idiot nor a fae." She turns to him with a flourish of her sleeve so elegant that it leaves him gaping. Minako notices—she grins with a dimple in one cheek and declares, "And I will show you why. Follow me." 

* * *

The dances of the _kitsune_ are peculiar in their slow, leisurely movements, given the usual mischievous energy of the _kitsune_ themselves. Yuuri's seen them before—but Minako breathes new life into the dance. Her bare feet glide and flit and rise and descend as if the ground is made of polished marble instead of jagged earth. She arches her spine, spins on the tips of her toes, _holds_ herself there with complete ease. It convinces him that any tension in her body is deliberate and purely theatrical, that she could do this for the rest of her life if allowed.

"I'll tell you a secret, Yuuri," she says to him, transitioning from one foot to another so smoothly that he nearly misses it. "Fae take too much pride in their wings, beautiful as they are."

She sets her foot back on the ground, and the way her _kimono_ ripples is untouchable grace. Says, "Fae only know how to fly."

She looks at him, finally. The magic is still flickering around her when she grasps his shoulders. Yuuri doesn't dare move. "We do not fly. We glide. We spin, or flow, or charm—we can do whatever we want."

The sharpness of her eyes melts. "Yuuri," she says, and this is it, this is the beginning, he can feel it. "Do you want to be able to do that?"

He takes a moment to breathe in the magic around her. It flowers in his lungs, brings them to bursting with a joy and anticipation he's never known before. His feet tingle, but he keeps them still just to show her that he can—that he can move them with the same control, too. The soft, knowing look in Minako's eyes solidifies his yearning with resolve.

"I want to—" he swallows, "I want to move like you."

Minako smiles and slaps his back. "Then stand up straight, clay child," she says loudly, "and raise your chin, and walk with purpose. We have your entire body to mould." 

* * *

Yuuri doesn't fully understand her words until his fifteenth year. He's growing into clumsy limbs and awkward changes, but a year under Minako's tutelage has transformed his dancing into a product of his entire body. He learns to let the crane of his neck compensate for the uncomfortable stretch of his arms, turns his wrists and angles his eyes to distract from growing pains. His feet, he subjects to a balance of care and demand. He massages them every night, then heads to the clearing Minako showed him first thing in the morning to dance for hours.

Even now, he's humming a tune he heard from the _ongaku_ foxes under his breath as he dips his feet into the river. He breaks off in the middle to huff out a laugh when graylings start gathering around them.

"I've got no food for you this time," he murmurs.

Minako always tells him that the fishes and fireflies gather around him to see him dance, not to be fed. _All the creatures in this forest are one,_ she said to him. _They feel what you feel when you dance. They love what you love. They would starve for it._

He's never truly believed her—but he wants to dance for them still. So, Yuuri pulls his knees to his chest and listens to the rush of river water, the creak of branches and rustle of leaves, distant birdsong, the wind whistling in his ear—all of it so quiet and languid, somehow reflective of the song he'd been humming. He feels it roll over him in waves. Magic like Minako's will never be his—but on days like this, the way it saturates the air is enough. It roils in his chest like a living thing, and suddenly, the urge to spring to his feet is irresistible.

Yuuri drags his toes against the soil and stretches up to the sky, holds himself still. Breathes. Remembers the way Minako's limbs cut through the air. He feels the same lightness in his own now, the freedom to move in any way with the discipline to make every movement count.

He loses track of time like this, taking a moment to sip at the river and eat some berries when his feet start to ache, and then jumping back into the dance. He doesn't even notice sundown approaching.

It's the noise that brings him back down—a sharp crack breaking through the atmosphere, a far cry from the soft melody of the forest Yuuri dances to.

He freezes in the middle of a lazy twirl. Turns to the mouth of the cave cautiously, heartbeat still pulsing with the way his entire body is a taut string balanced on the sole of one foot. When he sees the shock of silver hair, a sharp inhale and a twist of his ankle is all it takes to send him tumbling down. He scrambles back, ignoring the jolt of pain that shoots up his leg.

"Ah, wait!" the creature says—a fae? _Is that what a true fae looks like?_ Yuuri finds himself thinking, almost hysterically.

But he has no wings—Yuuri doesn't see any when he steps closer, into the light. The waterfall of silver swinging behind him would beg to differ, but Yuuri has no time to marvel at it when he's pushing himself against the wall of the cave.

"Wait, wait, where are you going? Don't run!" he exclaims. He seems to have no concept of caution or personal space, with the way he barrels into the cave without hesitation. "I only wanted to see what you were dancing to! That was nothing I've ever seen before—was it ballet? It wasn't, was it? Where did you learn it from?"

Yuuri can't answer him with anything except a strangled noise in his throat. The stranger looms ever-closer with his fae hair and unrelenting mouth and a glitter in his eyes that Yuuri's only ever seen in the most mischievous fox cubs. It's all too much for him; he scrambles to his feet and runs for the passageway shrouded in the cave's dark.

"Hey—don't go! Where are you going? Hey!" he hears behind him, but it soon turns distant.

Yuuri runs until he reaches his chinquapin tree, shoving himself inside and letting the fireflies' faint hum wash away the echo of the stranger's voice. The quiet settles, soothes his trembling. The leaves continue to fall, one by one. The red foxes roam. The moonshine falls soft. Everything is as it should be again and, though it takes three hours, Yuuri slips into an exhausted sleep. 

* * *

Two days after, he asks Minako, "Do all fae have wings?"

It's a meek mumble of a question, more to himself than to anyone else. Minako pauses in the middle of her demonstration. Yuuri expects a question of her own in reply, but she only says, "Their wings are their pride. Didn't I tell you?"

"You did," he stares down at the bedrock, "but I've seen _yo_ _sei_ without them, and I was just—what if they're hiding themselves, or don't want you to recognize them?"

" _Yosei_ are different. They belong to the same world as us," she raises a brow, "and I have trouble imagining a situation where a fae would want to hide from _you_ , and not the other way around."

He winces, thinking back to the stranger's overwhelming demeanor.

"Yuuri," Minako says, softer now, "trust me. You'll recognize a fae when you see them."

 _Are you sure?_ he wants to hold onto her sleeve and ask. _Are you really sure? Because he looked so much like_ —

He doesn't. Picks out a little slate-grey pebble and fumbles with it between his fingers. Says, "Okay."

He doesn't go back to the cave. 

* * *

Except, of course—the magic from the atmosphere will never stop seeping into him, growing restless in his dulling joints. He craves the near-sacred privacy of the riverside in his labyrinth of caves. The graylings and glowworms wait for him there, and when he starts thinking of them, no empty clearing in the woods satisfies him.

It takes him another three days, but he musters the courage and starts along the familiar path to them again. _He won't be there,_ he thinks, and determinedly takes off his _geta_. _He won't be there,_ he thinks again, and breathes in to receive that strange mix of calm and giddiness. _He won't,_ he presses into the forefront of his mind, and pictures freedom and discipline in the curve of his spine.

(He is.) 

* * *

The first clue is not sight, but sound. It's only when Yuuri sneaks into the first cave on bare feet that he hears the faint humming. It's a little disjointed, echoing too much in the closed space, and interspersed sometimes with words only half-known. No bamboo flute or _shamisen_ fills in its pauses. And yet—Yuuri feels, for some reason, that he could dance to this all night long.

He steps deeper into the dark, taking care not to disturb the scattered autumn leaves.

The fae-stranger sits cross-legged on the riverbank, swirling his fingertips in random, idle patterns on the surface of the water. There's a strange, frozen quality to his smile, as though he donned it in broad daylight and forgot to disarm it in darkness. His hair spills over his shoulders and back, pulled into a tight ponytail. _It looks painful,_ Yuuri thinks—wonders why anyone would subject themselves to such unnecessary pain. Yuuri can't see his eyes, and doesn't try to.

Perhaps he could forgive the _kitsune_ calling him _fae child_ if all human children look like this, bright and delicate. Perhaps he is an anomaly—large-eyed and rough-haired in the water's reflection. Perhaps that's why he is here and not outside, he thinks, and it makes something hollow ring inside of him.

But Yuuri's dancing was like nothing this bright, beautiful stranger had ever seen before, and so he breathes in the mountain dust, remembers that it is his, and purposefully steps into a pile of crackling leaves.

The stranger whips around his head to look at him. "You! You came back," he says, with a frightening intensity behind his pupils. "I knew you would!"

"P-please, I—I don't want any trouble," Yuuri has to say.

He blinks, and it's lost. "Trouble? What trouble would I give _you_?"

There's something about the way he says it—as though Yuuri is something unreachable, protected, the beauty with red-lined eyes dancing on polished marble. It makes him distinctly uncomfortable, but also surprised enough to ask, "Why are you here again? This place is—it isn't yours."

He leans back against a boulderstone and says, "Is it yours then?"

 _Yes,_ Yuuri wants to say. _Yes, it's mine._

The stranger must see it in his eyes—it's there in the way Yuuri holds his gaze firm, bares himself in it for just a moment of open vulnerability. _Yes, it's mine. It's the only thing that's mine._

The moment passes, and he casts his eyes to the ground again. He says, "It doesn't matter, I'm only—it doesn't matter." He stops, breathes in. Tries again. "Either way, I don't think you're—"

"But you were dancing here," the boy says. It startles Yuuri; his tone is insistent, and the frown between his brows distorts his entire visage. It leaves Yuuri feeling as if he's flipped a puzzle piece upside-down, pulled a thread in the Cat's Cradle too taut. "I saw you. You danced with your whole body—you made music with it. You've been dancing here a long time, haven't you?"

He swallows past the dryness in his throat. "Not that long."

The stranger leans forward in his direction, looks at him with summer-sky eyes. He's still sitting, and yet Yuuri feels the urge to retreat and shield his own eyes. He demands, "How long?"

"Just over a year," he hears himself say, and abruptly shakes his head. "B-but you don't need to know that! Please, can you just—?"

"Wow, a year and you can already do all that? That spin you ended on last time was just—"

"S-stop!" he interrupts. "You weren't supposed to see that!"

The stranger puts a finger to his lips and says, "Well, you did break it rather ungracefully."

Through a flash of indignation, Yuuri says, "Maybe you shouldn't have surprised me into falling and twisting my ankle, then."

"You twisted your ankle?" he slips out of his nonchalant posture so quickly, it leaves Yuuri dizzy. His eyes are no less bright when he reaches for Yuuri's foot—but it takes only a missed heartbeat for Yuuri to remember dampness and fear, screams and silver. "Let me see, that looks terrible—"

" _Get away!_ "

The two of them freeze. A pause, and the boy slowly pulls his hand back. He pulls up his smile instead, the terribly empty one from before. Yuuri feels sick with guilt and wrongness at the sight of it.

"Did I get too carried away?" he asks. There's a lilt to it, affected, fortifying the deceptive lightness of his voice.

Yuuri says nothing. His throat closes up in accusatory protest every time he tries to speak.

The seconds pass in silence, and finally, the wretched smile drops off increment by increment. The stranger sighs. "I'm sorry for disturbing you," he says. "I'll stop coming, if that puts you at ease."

 _Stop coming,_ Yuuri repeats in his head—as if it's a routine rather than a halfhearted detour. The words come rushed and sudden: "You've been coming here? For days?"

The boy pauses. The way he looks at Yuuri is still and searching, almost preternatural. "Five days," he says, finally.

 _Why?_ Yuuri wants to ask. _Tell me. Why did you wait? What was it that you saw? Do you really think it was worth it? Tell me._

All he says is, "You don't have to stop."

The beautiful boy's eyes grow wider and brighter, impossibly. He looks like he's biting the inside of his cheek. Self-consciousness makes Yuuri say, "I won't dance for you, though."

"Okay," he says. Laughs a little, and finally, finally, the grip around Yuuri's throat and heart gives way. "Okay."

* * *

His name is Victor.

 _It suits you,_ Yuuri thinks, when Victor first mentions it and grins through his mouthful of kumquats. It's odd-sounding but dignified nonetheless, appropriate for a boy who carries grace like a _yokai's_ charm in the flourishes of his hands. Once or twice, he'll grandly wave a hand in the air and accidentally knock it into Yuuri's chin, and perhaps the way he apologizes so sincerely is why the odd name, with its complicated syllables, takes.

"You haven't even told me yours yet," Victor complains. They're sitting some ways away from the riverbank, sorting out the fruits Victor picked on his way through the forest.

"It's Yuuri," he murmurs. "Wait, is this—are these _doku utsugi_ berries? Why would you bring these?"

"They looked good," Victor offers simply, picking out one of the red berries from the pile. Yuuri snatches it back.

"You can't eat those, those are poisonous!"

Victor flicks a disinterested glance at the berries, and then seems to forget about them entirely. His eyes look back to Yuuri— _oh, there's that glitter again_ , but deeper, mysterious—and he repeats, "Yuuri."

It's honey-sweet, the way he says it—slow and thoughtful and stretched out like a thing savoured, like he's mouthing it for the sake of getting used to it.

"Am I saying it right?" Victor asks him.

Yuuri doesn't know how to say, _I don't think anyone's ever said my name like that_ , and so he only nods.

Victor hums. Then, with that quality of playful deliberation, he taps a finger against his lips and muses, "It suits you," Yuuri would start, but his attention is fixed on that hint of a smile blooming under Victor's fingertip, "it's pretty."

In time, perhaps, he'll learn to predict it, or deflect it, or accept it—but for now, Victor's talent for casually tilting the world sideways leaves Yuuri in a bit of a stupor. He opens his mouth, finds his lungs empty. Lets them fill before he opens it again. "I'm not," he starts woodenly, and suddenly can't say much more.

Victor looks at him sharply for a second, and then averts his eyes and carries on as if he hadn't heard Yuuri at all, "I know someone else named Yuri too, you know, but he's far too brash. Not nearly sweet enough, I keep telling him."

"That's nice," Yuuri says, a little faintly still, instead of, _why are you telling me this?_

"Really? He always tells me I'm rude and awful," he plops his chin in his palm; the way he stares at Yuuri is at odds with the flippant tone of his voice, "but I don't suppose you'd tell anyone that. There's something different about you, Yuuri."

He could say: _I was raised by fox spirits._ Or, _some of them tell me I'm human but I don't know what that means._ Or, _I want to go outside sometimes._ Or, _I'm still afraid, just not of the forest._ Or, _I think dancing saved my life._

But none of it is what Victor means, and for the life of him, Yuuri can't read the straight line of his mouth or the strange clarity in his eyes. He shifts away his gaze to Victor's shoulder—to the wall behind him—back again to the way his fingers tap patiently against his cheek and his mouth smiles soft and inscrutable.

"Maybe I'll know what it is someday," he says, low and sighing. Honey is in the way the words are shaped and exhaled, soft golden dripping from his tongue. His eyes spark wild-blue, jarringly alive with the smoke of his hair. _Fire and gold,_ Minako had said—and Yuuri wonders, for the hundredth time, how human Victor really is, wonders what creature is made of smoke and sweetness and yet feels so terrifyingly alien.

"Maybe," he half-whispers. 

* * *

"Do you see it? The air _sings_ with magic when they dance, Yuuri," Minako gushes, her eyes never straying from the center of the temple. She takes him up to the holy mountain every two months to watch the _myobu_ dance in tribute to _Amenouzume-no-Mikoto._

They're beautiful, certainly—but Yuuri can't help but wish the fires they conjure to be bluer, wishes they weren't so smokeless. He sees the twinkle in one lady's eye and thinks it should shine somewhere deeper, looks at the playful quirk of another's mouth and thinks it deserves someplace sweeter. He wonders what Minako would say about her pupil finding a whole microcosm of magic in the crevices of someone so supposedly mundane.

"Are you watching closely? You won't find magic like this anywhere else, you know," she continues to praise.

Yuuri says nothing. 

* * *

He can't stop thinking about it, the days after.

His relationship with Victor is strange and tenuous, a mess of novelty and confusion persisting far beyond their expected time. There's a bittersweet charm to him, for certain—and it has Yuuri sitting in wait for his erratically-timed visits to the cave as soon as the sun signals high noon. Victor follows his example religiously; some days, he strolls into the cave in pressed velvet, other days, he stumbles in with an awkward smile and disheveled hair. Everyday, he crouches beside Yuuri to feed the graylings, watches him sift through wild plants, draws pictures in the sand to show him pieces of the humans outside—metal contraptions they drive and how they crowd the marketplaces and the decadent way they dress, things as strange and surreal as Victor.

He's scratching out a poorly-recreated version of his family estate's garden now, the outline of it suggesting a place terribly neat and not at all reminiscent of the designed chaos of the woods. But Victor's brows are twitching in concentration, his lips pursing, the careful pause-and-resume of his hand imbuing an oddly powerful, oddly endearing quality to the shaky lines it draws. _Watch him,_ some deep urge within Yuuri says, clawed and vulpine, and so Yuuri watches.

Except—except for that one stray lock of silver, coming loose from his tie and falling across his forehead with the softest curl. Yuuri thinks of how it would sway with the wind if Victor danced. Thinks, _would it flow with it or fight against it?_ Thinks, _would it get tangled up when he spins?_ Thinks, _would he blow it away from his face in the middle?_ He can't, can't, _can't_ stop thinking.

They're pebbles building up into a mountain, finally breaking into a weight in his throat. Yuuri hears the words more than he speaks them: "Victor, do you—do you dance, too?"

Victor stops sketching with such abruptness that Yuuri almost starts apologizing, but he only looks up at him and sniffs, "Do I dance? I'm offended, Yuuri, I'll have you know I'm on my way to becoming the best dancer of my generation."

"So," he says slowly, "you're not the best yet?"

Victor sighs, "I'd love to say I am," he stands up with a flourish and a secretive glint in his eye, "but sixteen-year-olds aren't allowed in the Mariinsky Ballet."

"Mariinsky?"

"Ah, it's a company that employs dancers to—perform, I suppose, in front of thousands of people." He chuckles. "It's strange having to explain it. I usually never have to."

Yuuri swallows past the lump in his throat, suddenly self-conscious. "You don't have to."

"No, no!" Victor plops down next to him, scoots closer with that eager, wide-eyed single-mindedness Yuuri's come to associate him with. "I'd love to tell you all about it, I promise," he hesitates, "if you want me to?"

The hesitation is fleeting, only a breath in between words and a quick glance to the side. Yet, the new, nestled vulnerability of it incites something in Yuuri—the vulpine creature, alive again, rising again. _Tell me everything about your world,_ it says through bared teeth, _and tell me if I can belong to it._

The last part startles Yuuri into saying, "Can you tell me?"

Victor doesn't waste a moment. "I wish you could see the stage, it's—the lights follow you, and the high ceiling makes the music echo, it's my favourite thing in the world! And the dancers—Yuuri, they're so beautiful, the way they dance there. One time, my grandfather showed me their costumes, all sequins and frills—they looked so difficult to dance in but, god, the dancers looked _infinite_ on stage, you can't even imagine!"

 _I can_ , Yuuri thinks, sure and insistent in his mind. Out loud, he says, "Will you show me?"

For a single beat of his heart, the blue of Victor's eyes grows opaque. It reminds Yuuri of the way his own breath had stilled in his chest and left him as, _'I won't dance for you,'_ weeks before. Perhaps Victor will refuse him in return, might have been nursing the memory of Yuuri's coldness for this moment.

He doesn't. He smiles wide enough for the bridge of his nose to wrinkle and bring out the freckles dusted across. He says, "I will," like a moonbeam.

Victor stands again, the sinuous roll of his muscles a world away from the energy earlier.

"When I was there last, I saw The Firebird," he says, almost sighs. _Maybe I'll know what it is someday,_ Yuuri remembers, and feels the same thick sweetness shiver down his spine.

The nature of his footfalls has changed—step after quiet step, each seemingly on the verge of dance but then teasing away from it. The ripple of his shoulders says otherwise, transforming the usual flourishes of his arms into something subtle and musical. This—the strange intermission between a prelude and the act itself, it captures within Yuuri a sense of hopelessness he doesn't yet know how to name.

Finally, Victor rises to his tiptoes. He leaps and spins, twists his torso and changes directions in a manner both frantic and seamless. His voice dips into a murmur, "A prince strays into a magical realm and seeks to break a spell on the woman he falls in love with," his movements grow covetous, a heaviness weighing upon his features despite the lightness of his voice, "and he finds a Firebird to help him do it."

It's not just the bold emotion he broadcasts in gross movements—it's the little flickers of motion too. The turn of his wrist showcases a deliberate elegance amid the spontaneity of his hands, the tilt of his chin and flutter of his lashes come together in a refined sort of androgyny. All the little actions are nuanced by a calculated fervour that makes them grand. Suddenly, unquestionably, he is the prince searching for his Firebird. He is the fox dancing at the top of the mountain. He is the fae child in all the stories and warnings.

"You know, I always wondered why he didn't fall in love with the Firebird instead," Victor says, eyelids shut. He leaps into the air on one foot, high and elysian, leg kicked back, spine and neck arched in tandem to face the sky. Yuuri knows this is the climax even before he lands on the other foot.

"What was that," he breathes to himself. Then, louder, "What was _that?_ "

"That was ballet," Victor laughs, "but that's not all I know."

He's opened his eyes—is Victor once again, just Victor. The apples of his cheeks are flushed, the freckles twice as eye-catching. Delight is a charming, unhidden thing in his laugh lines. His voice still sounds on the verge of laughter when he says, "My tutor, he always tells me I can't fully appreciate what makes ballet a distinct art form until I know of all the others."

His feet are moving, still; a restless tap here, a fidgety shuffle there. _He doesn't want to stop_ , Yuuri thinks—doesn't think he'll ever want to stop. Victor watches him with the same vibrancy, says, "Look," and Yuuri _does,_ helplessly. "Yuuri, look."

He jerks up his chin, a show of histrionic smugness that has Yuuri giggling, and performs a triple-step and kick. "The jitterbug," he says grandly. Then, he takes a long, reaching step, followed by two small leap-steps, and says, "redowa," moves his feet to a series of beats, with a strong accent on the third, "mazurka," makes a walking motion in place, with dynamic swings of his arms and legs, "the Charleston."

Finally, he straightens with a composed, almost regal bearing. It kills a heartbeat in Yuuri's chest to hear him say, "And of course," low voice, hand on his chest, all chivalry and gentleness, "there's the classic waltz."

When Victor reaches out for him, his hand is sure and confident, and Yuuri waits for it, he waits for his touch to catalyze some seismic shift in him—

Only, Victor stops a hairsbreadth away. Yuuri would bridge the distance himself, if not for the smile Victor gives him—a small, private thing, the kind Yuuri would've thought ill-suited to Victor's extravagant nature, but it's the sweetest little thing he's ever been privy to. The waning moon casts shadows upon his face, and their sharp edges against his dewy skin define a dreamlike intimacy with his smile. The thought of that nameless, hopeless thing comes to Yuuri again.

"May I?" Victor murmurs, his smile turning rueful.

Yuuri won't flinch back this time, won't yell for him to get away. He couldn't.

"Y-yes, but what—" he stutters, even when he's allowing Victor to pull him up and their hands are gripping tighter around each other's, "um, what do you want me to do?"

Victor hums, fitting his other hand into the crook of Yuuri's waist and pulling him closer in one smooth, singular motion.

"Quite a few things," he says flippantly, "but for now, your hand on my shoulder will do."

It's a struggle in the beginning, a jumble of, "One, two, three—no, not that way," and, "Did I step on your foot?" and, "Victor, I can't see a thing—" "Just hold onto me," amid darkness and jagged, peering starlight. It takes a couple of almost-falls, but the rhythm becomes intrinsic and the magic starts to simmer on Yuuri's skin again.

"Maybe this would've been easier with a music box," Victor says through a smile. It sounds like a throwaway sentiment—but the forest is Yuuri's home, this shadowed cave his sanctuary, and with its familiarity comes the need to correct him.

"I haven't been dancing for a year to a music box, you realize," he murmurs. It comes easier than expected, in the midst of warmth and security. "The music is here. Listen."

"What do you mean?"

" _Listen._ " He wills the river current closer, the night wind swifter through the leaves.

Victor slows his steps but says nothing. The stubbornness that rushes through Yuuri at this is unexpected and unrelenting; it is imperative, suddenly, for Victor to understand.

In shoving his anxiety to the back of his mind, Yuuri makes way for the executive decision to stop hiding his face away. He evens his breathing, takes care not to let go of Victor's hand or shoulder, and looks straight up at him. It takes Victor by surprise, he thinks—the cyanic shine of his eyes clashes with the starlight, both too pale, both too striking. His tousled hair looks like it's going to be whisked away by the moon any minute. He hardly belongs on earth, the way he looks now.

It's so, so difficult for Yuuri to believe he can't hear the magic of the forest. He has to say, "It's here, do you hear it?" Without knowing, his voice has dropped to that half-murmur, half-whisper Victor favours. If this pulsating wildness is what he feels every time he uses it, then perhaps Yuuri can forgive him. "I promise, it's here."

He hears the hitch in Victor's breath at that—and so he says it again, soft and slow, "I promise, Victor."

"Okay," Victor breathes into his hair. The hand on his waist slides to the small of his back. "I believe you."

His eyes have gone half-lidded, the angles of his mouth terribly content. It's almost somnolent, if not for the way his thumb rubs circles into the back of Yuuri's hand and the arm around his waist draws him closer in tiny, steady increments. The weight of his cheek against Yuuri's hair is heavy and tentative. Their swaying feels like a bid for permanence. Yuuri wonders what else he could ask for, how much Victor might give him.

"Can you teach me more of this?" he asks, almost voiceless. "More of—what you do, what you know?"

Victor smiles against his temple. It's enough of an answer. 

* * *

A fortnight later, Minako says to him, "You're different today."

He stops in the middle of a single-footed spin— _a_ _fouetté,_ Victor had called it. His pause gives Minako an opening to ask, "What changed?"

Yuuri looks at her crossed arms, the elegant drape of her fingers over the crook of her elbow. He looks at her slit pupils and the way her nose twitches at smells he can't catch. Her protectiveness of him and her high-born niche in the world of the _kitsune_ have never seemed more irreconcilable. He wants to tell her he imagined catching wisps of smoke in the curl of his fingers, honey condensing with the sweep of his lashes. He wants to go back to the cave and tell her nothing at all.

"Must be the full moon," he says, and resists the urge to sweep his _yukata_ into a series of chaînés turns. 

* * *

It comes back to Yuuri later that day, Minako's ever-present voice in his head chanting, _"What changed?"_

"Show me that _fouetté_ again," Victor says. Yuuri glides into it with the same ease as before, the way he did mere hours earlier—and yet it's different, as if every footstep from Minako's clearing to this cave has both galvanized and liberated it. _What changed?_ she asks again, while Victor says, "Just like that! Amazing, Yuuri!"

 _Listen_ , she says. It jolts him back to a world of paleness and wildness, murmurs and whispers and an acquiescence breathed into his hair. "Once more, Yuuri, let me see it once more," Victor says. _What changed?_ The voice is Yuuri's now. He jumps to Victor's, "Can you— _yes_ , Yuuri, that looked beautiful," and thinks, _what changed?_ He arches his back to Victor's, "Yuuri, Yuuri, the way you dance is so—!" and thinks, _what changed?_ He melts into a _fondue_ to Victor's, " _Yuuri,_ " and stops.

Victor's eyes are liquid. The wide pull of his smile defines the bow of his mouth even more, makes his cheekbones look sharp enough to cut glass on—all his sharp edges made sharper. Still, the way he's staring at Yuuri turns it all into a wicked sort of sweetness. It's in the way his eyes don't dare look away, and his breaths go deep and slow enough to be sighs. He looks like he could open his mouth and it would pour out black treacle.

"Yuuri," he says, and it does, it _is_. He laughs a little. Smiles softer. Looks, and looks, and looks. "Yuuri, I hear it."

The voice inside his head breaks and yields. The silence given way is a pliant thing, waiting for Victor's next words with bated breath.

 _Something has changed,_ Yuuri thinks instead, and it trickles, sweetly, into his veins. 

* * *

"Where d'you go when you want to just—clear your head?" Victor asks him once, quietly.

It's not a pensive quiet—it's not careful enough for that, syllables slipping on the distracted way he muses. Lightning flashes and thunderclaps reign outside. He and Yuuri are huddled in one of the deeper caves tonight, the song of the river a little distant and the glowworms happier in the dark. They remind him of the fireflies waiting for him, lighting up his nerve endings when he wants to dream beautiful dreams.

"Do you even need a place like that?" Victor continues. "The woods are so quiet all by themselves."

Yuuri thinks of the _yako_ who tripped him up during the temple gathering yesterday, the _kodama_ who kept following him a day before that, screeching because he'd stepped on its root in drowsiness. He can't help but say, "They really aren't." He can feel Victor's attention swing to him, awakened and focusing in, and so he says, "Where I sleep, there are—fireflies, so many of them." He takes a moment. Clears his throat. "They calm me down."

"How many?"

His grip on his knee tightens, a weak defense against the shiver rising from his paper-thin ribcage. The darkness and Victor's voice make the space between them feel like _nothing_. Yuuri remembers the surrealism of their first meeting, counts every firefly that had settled on his bounding pulse to calm him. He whispers, "Enough for me."

He wonders if they would have been enough for this. He pulls his knees closer to his chest, unreasonably conscious of the scraping sound his feet make.

"Fireflies," Victor says slowly, as if to conjure them. "That's," he huffs out a breath of laughter, warm and low, "surprising. You always surprise me, Yuuri."

 _How do you mean?_ he wants to ask.

Alas, the thought of Victor not answering makes him afraid—the thought of him answering truthfully even more so. So he only says, "Is it really so surprising to you? You must've seen fireflies before."

Victor hesitates. "I have, but not in the way I think you mean," a flicker of his hands, gesticulating through the dark, "I don't know how to explain. Things are different here."

The texture of his voice is jagged, sentences hastening headfirst into pauses that sound abrupt and unplanned. Yuuri finds himself praying for another flash of lightning, strong enough to linger in the atmosphere and show him Victor's summer-sky eyes again, creased with agitation as they may be. _Let me see him,_ he pleads. _Just for a moment, let me see_ —but _Raijin_ doesn't indulge him this time. The darkness is wretched and fickle, and the space between them a chasm.

"I wish I didn't have to—" Victor starts, mostly to himself. He stops. Even his breaths sound hollow.

"Do you," is all Yuuri blurts out before his throat closes up. He swallows it down—it, his doubts, his insecurities, his need for inertia, and surrenders it all to his prayers for chaos. "Do you want to see?" When Victor doesn't reply, he inhales and tries again, "The, uh, fireflies. If you want to see them, we could—do you want to see them?"

A beat, and then—the touch to the back of Yuuri's hand is his _yes,_ his _please_ and _thank you_ and perhaps something else.

He doesn't need the lightning this time. 

* * *

They try to wait for the thunderstorm to pass, but—when you offer Victor an inch, he takes a mile with such expectancy, you'd think it owed and freely given. In many ways, Yuuri supposes it was.

The two of them trek through flooded soil and creaking branches. Some of the storm's intensity has abated, but the creatures of the forest stay burrowed in their shelters. _There's more to come,_ Yuuri realizes, and hurries along a convoluted pathway protected by great, arching chinquapin oaks. He can hear Victor's footsteps behind him, frantic and splashing through drenched mud. He smiles a little, thinking of dirt stains on his breeches, his moonshine hair darkened with rainwater and brought down to earth.

Deeper into the cover, and the pounding of the rain relents. Deeper yet; the shadow of his foxhole comes into view. Closer and closer—the fireflies twinkle from afar. He can feel them, finally—their cheer and vitality, the familiarity of their patterns.

"Oh," Victor breathes.

Yuuri, through the unwinding tension in his muscles, only says, "Come."

They walk slowly, one awestruck and the other savouring. The fireflies dance around Yuuri, surround him with buzzes of complaint and exhilaration and curiosity after hours of his absence. Every part of it fills him with inimitable joy.

A baby firefly settles on the tip of his nose, and a laugh bubbles out of his throat like it was waiting for the chance. He reaches behind him, finds the wet silk of Victor's tunic and tugs without looking. "What are you waiting for?" he calls through vestiges of laughter.

Victor follows it blindly, colt-legs after a divine summon, clasping his fingers around Yuuri's wrist as if it's _Shakyamuni's_ spider thread. He tugs and tugs, oblivious, and Victor stumbles into the centre of a cloudburst of rain, and within that, of winking lights, and within that, of building devotion.

"This is where you sleep?" he asks, peering into the chinquapin's hollow, wide and dark and intimidating. "Every night?"

"Most nights," Yuuri answers, sweeping his palm across the roughness of the bark. The ridges and grooves fit against it like a glove.

"And it doesn't frighten you?"

He looks at Victor, speaking of fright and yet tracing the gnarled edges of his sleeping-place with such reverence. "It used to," he admits. The very fabric of this place demands honesty, constructed with age-old earth and the spirits of the dead and, now, the metamorphosis of childlike fear into childlike wonder, freely confessed and freely shared. "Sometimes, yes. But now, it's—the fireflies made it easier. They make it hard to think of anything else," the little lights gather around his ears, as if to whisper their thanks, "they're so bright."

"They are," Victor agrees, watching a firefly play around his fingers. He smiles. "Energetic, too."

"Not always. They're calm when they need to be," Yuuri says. He hesitates, flicking his gaze to Victor and then back to the fireflies again, and corrects, "When I need them to be."

The hollow is too small to fit both of them comfortably, so they settle with their backs to the trunk. The crown looms above as a dense, dwarfing structure to shield them from the worst of the rainfall, its yellow blossoms hanging heavy and the tips of its serrated leaves dribbling rainwater in steady _drip-drips_ on their heads. Yuuri sits with his ankles crossed. Awareness is in the beat of his heart, the raindrop lingering at his brow bone—Victor's eyes on him, unashamed and powerful, when his voice is so absent. Yuuri longs to hear it again, wants it suddenly and wretchedly. His mouth is bitter and his lungs smokeless.

"What is it?" he has to say, before the emptiness swallows him whole.

The life in Victor's eyes is enormous, all the vibrancy of his being rippling through wild-blue. Their aquamarine glitter is incongruous with his dulled, plastered hair—looks almost like a sickness, one that's fixated on Yuuri, spreading through Yuuri, belonging entirely to Yuuri.

Victor speaks: "You have a whole world here," a sweet murmur. Underneath the honeyed notes of his voice is a different creature, though—perhaps not vulpine, but greedy nonetheless. The answering howl builds in Yuuri's chest, a cry of sympathy, an echo, _tell me if I can belong to it._ The decision to touch his knee to Victor's is inevitable, then—it's enough, that singular point of contact, for his insides to go quiet. But Victor looks, and looks, and looks, as if the sight of Yuuri will leave him forever if he looks away. The silence in Yuuri, too, is no longer self-possessed—is pliant and helpless, begging him to quell the growing disquietude on Victor's face in any way he can.

"It's not just the fireflies," he tries, grappling for something to say. "Look up."

He does, with a kind of reluctant slowness. Yuuri waits until his gaze is fixed to the sky, then points out a constellation only just visible through the clouds. He asks, "That one—there, can you see it?"

"Орион," Victor says, out of surprise more than anything else.

Yuuri blinks at the guttural sounds. "Have you seen it before?"

"Of course," he says. "Orion, the sign of the hunter. Fearlessness and strength, I suppose."

The line of his mouth has broken into a nostalgic grin, now. His shoulders lean back against the bark, loose and easy. Whatever understanding or freedom or familiarity the stars have given him, it diffuses across to Yuuri—he relaxes against the ball of Victor's shoulder, his voices and silent spaces content.

"We—I've always called it _Sode Boshi_ ," he says. The words leave him softly, dandelion seeds floating and dissipating in the air between them. "For a _kimono_ sleeve."

"That's a little odd," Victor says. He smiles through it—might have turned his head to nuzzle into Yuuri's hair, a bit, and something in the pit of Yuuri's belly violently turns upside-down. He bites his lip and smiles through it too, albeit shakily.

"It's _not_ , look," Yuuri traces his finger along the shape of the constellation, "it looks like woman holding out her sleeve and letting it drape across the sky."

"Mm, very graceful."

He shoves at Victor's shoulder. "It is. Graceful and beautiful." The thought of Minako's lessons comes to him; he opens his mouth, but her name alone is too heavy on his tongue. A pause; he recalls the way her lips had moulded around her natural wisdom, mouths it himself in one measured exhale, and says, carefully, "My—someone told me, once, that the stars are always in the sights of those who embody them. This, _Sode Boshi_ —she told me it favours the hands of the beautiful. You can always find it there, in their palms."

He picks at the grass; the moment stretches, his cheeks flushing with warmth. He twists a blade around his forefinger, tight and grounding, and says, "It—it doesn't make a lot of sense, I know, I'm sorry—"

—A touch to the underside of his chin, tipping it up. Victor doesn't withdraw his finger after it's coaxed Yuuri's face towards him—only settles it there more comfortably, the affectionate curl of it under his chin, the knuckle firm against his jawline, the thumb flirting with the edge of his bottom lip. The words choke in Yuuri's throat.

"It makes sense, Yuuri," he says, thick and smoldering and somehow all the air Yuuri needs to breathe again. The brightness behind his eyes is inextricably human and animal, a thing desperate to believe and be believed in. He says again, "I promise, it makes all the sense in the world," and Yuuri is lost. Victor carries his heart in his eyes and yet Yuuri is lost—as if it's imprinting letters on the inside of Victor's ribcage with every clamoring beat, and here Yuuri is, illiterate and hopeless.

Then, his expression shrouds over. His gaze flicks down to the rain-trodden grass and back to Yuuri again, as if he can't quite keep it away. "I wish—" he says. Stops.

"You said that before," Yuuri tells him—needs to, suddenly. "You were going to say something before."

"I did, I know I did, I—I just," the fight goes out of him. He lets his head drop, rakes a hand through his bangs. Mouths, _want this_ , in the silhouette of his hair—maybe. _Maybe,_ Yuuri reminds himself.

"You don't have to go," he says, doesn't think, doesn't let himself. _So look up. Look at me._

Victor does, and for some reason, it feels unbelievable that he would. It feels too good to be true, the most joyous dream he's been gifted to dream. _Look at me,_ he thinks, and Victor _listens._ Yuuri wants him to keep listening, wants desperately to hold onto this. "Stay," he says, and his voice has never been stronger. "You can stay—at least for the night. You don't have to go."

Victor looks at him searchingly. "Can I? Are you sure?"

"Yes." It's immediate, certain. Convincing, too, if the way Victor relaxes is anything to judge by.

"The fireflies won't mind?" The quirk of his mouth is in jest, but Yuuri answers seriously.

"They won't," he says. Reaches for his sleeve. Touches the tips of his fingers to the skin of Victor's wrist, and smiles when he shivers. "Promise." 

* * *

They wait until _Sode Boshi_ is at its brightest. Their eyelids grow leaden and their speech starts to slur, but still they wait. Rainfall has left the air pleasantly cool, though, and petrichor is Yuuri's favourite perfume. He falls asleep to the soft way Victor's breath fans out against his neck.

Hours pass in a sequence of dreams, vivid and psychedelic. His eyes open again in too short a time. The night doesn't feel real enough around him, his formless dreams still hooked to the edge of his consciousness. He can't even feel the prickle of the grass. He stays down, curiously weightless.

It takes some immeasurable amount of time to notice Victor's eyes, slit open. He seems to be in the same state as Yuuri—awake and not, a ghost and not. They've slipped down to their backs in sleep, their heads cushioned by weeds and their bodies facing each other. The way their feet have knocked into each other wakes him up a bit, but not quite. He doesn't close his eyes—he has to wait, he has to let this wanting hollowness subside. Victor doesn't close his either.

Victor's throat moves; a second, two, three, his mouth trying to open against the arcane heaviness of the witching hour.

"I thought—" he says. His voice is hoarse, and his self-mocking chuckle is only a puff of air. "Thought I'd dreamt you."

Yuuri whispers, "Me bringing you here?"

"No, just," Victor frowns, shakes his head a little, "just you."

Yuuri doesn't understand. He wants to close his eyes again, but he can't—not until Victor's are still open. He watches him breathe, counts all his captivating little details to keep himself awake. The slow expansion of his chest. The way his eyelashes clump together. The way his nose gives small, occasional twitches. The unafraid openness in his gaze as it slides down to Yuuri's mouth.

"Your mouth is so pretty," Victor whispers, like a secret that makes him ache. "I think about it all the time." His stares for a little longer, then closes his eyes languidly. His voice is a conundrum, soft with sleep and still sparking with feverishness. "I think about you all the time."

Yuuri wonders if this is what he was waiting for—because it doesn't banish the hollowness, it only makes it worse. The empty spaces throb in him. Even the pounding of his heart is a distant thing. _Don't leave me like this,_ he thinks at Victor. _Look at me._ But the boy doesn't listen this time, his breathing already deep and evened out.

Sleep has a way of overcoming even the most pivotal happenings in your life, Yuuri supposes, and wills it to take him too. 

* * *

Hours—seconds—light-years later, he wakes up to Victor tracing the lines of his palm. He's propped up on an elbow, blinking hazily. His lashes look like molten gold in the first rays of the dawn.

"What are you doing?" Yuuri croaks out.

His fingertips slow, and stop. He takes them away with a gentle drag against Yuuri's palm. When he looks up, his smile is luminous, and heart-mouthed, and everything Yuuri knows Victor to be—but the joy of it is tinged with something pervasive and devastating, some crucial testament known only to him. It makes Yuuri's hand clench and unclench with the need to seek out Victor's—feels like holding Victor's hand is the answer to all the universe, like it will conquer their every problem. But Victor only taps Yuuri's fingers and folds them inward, as if to preserve whatever dear, unseeable pattern he saw.

"Nothing," he says. 

* * *

The fabric of them, of Yuuri and Victor, is a delicate thing—and it shifts, too, with delicacy. Their threads will unravel with fineness, not force. Even their mistakes, their lapses in propriety and pitfalls in self-restraint, will be precious. Fleeting glances to the bow of Victor's mouth or the curve of Yuuri's neck will be breaks in time, frequent but finite. The buried thing in Yuuri's chest and spine, in the pit of his stomach and his empty spaces, will be brought to a simmer by smoke and honey. It will rise and yawn and want—a look from beneath his lashes, a touch to Victor's neck when he fixes his collar, his hands flitting over his own body when he dances, a known-unknown deliberateness to the way he smiles—sometimes, only sometimes, but it is awake. Once, they will bathe in their river when the glowworms are dim and— _I can't see, oh, Yuuri, I can't see_ — _you can see perfectly fine, you're so—oh, Yuuri, I'm drowning—stop it, come here_ —Yuuri is the one to slip on the riverbed, and Victor is the one to catch him, and— _oh,_ the buried thing sings, because it's there in Victor too, in the way his hand lingers at Yuuri's naked hip and his smile comes back with a dangerous edge. _You're so,_ Yuuri thinks, _you're so—_ further yet, it (he) pleads, further.

—Alas, humanity is as inconvenient as it is glorious. 

* * *

On the edge between winter and spring, Victor comes to him with snowflakes on his best woolen coat and no sign of his usual exuberance. He wanders into the cave like his feet took him there by accident, doesn't even look up until Yuuri comes into plain sight, tracing out the theatre stage Victor showed him in the wet riverside sand. He stares at Yuuri like he's seen a ghost.

"Victor?" Yuuri calls, when Victor says nothing.

"You're—oh," he fumbles, "I didn't think you'd be here."

Yuuri looks at him oddly, because he's in their cave, in their forest, crossed by the iridescent sheen of their river. "I'm where I've always been, though?"

A break in time, again. "Yes," Victor breathes out. Something in him has settled too deep. "Yes."

"Victor," Yuuri says again. Shaping his mouth around the syllables of his name anchors him. "Are you sure you're alright?"

"Ah, well," he sounds tired; even the habitual smile in his voice is strained. He sinks down beside Yuuri, careful not to disturb the figures in the sand. "Maybe, maybe not. I can't tell." His thigh and knee are warm against Yuuri's, but Victor doesn't look at him. "Can you?"

The question feels important, for all Victor's evasiveness. Carefully, Yuuri says, "You don't seem like yourself," he pauses, "completely like yourself."

For a moment, nothing in Victor seems to have changed. He's staring down at the broken lines drawn crudely into the sand, his hands wringing together in what could almost be restlessness. His face betrays nothing. Then, he speaks: "Sometimes," he says, and it is the sweetest, the rawest, the farthest-reaching he has ever spoken, "I think I'm only myself when I'm with you."

It seeps into every cell in Yuuri's body, a sweet and fragile numbness. Makes his chest feel too small for his heart, his lungs useless. He can't breathe but he answers, _he answers,_ "I don't want you to be anyone but yourself anyway."

Victor takes hold of his left arm with both hands, twin grips around his elbow and forearm. He pulls it down to lay his head onto Yuuri's shoulder. It's nothing gentle, nothing but startling and possessive and needy, a hard knock of his forehead against Yuuri's jutting bones.

"I want to stay here but I'm," his exhale is a frustrated huff against Yuuri's collarbone, "afraid. I'm afraid of so many things, Yuuri."

"What things?"

"Of not knowing what I want, or maybe wanting too much." He burrows his head deeper into the crook of Yuuri's neck. Goes quiet, almost as though he doesn't want Yuuri to hear, "Of not being able to stay."

Yuuri turns cold all over. "What do you mean—"

"Tell me about this place," Victor cuts him off, and he freezes. "Can you—? Can you tell me more about how you live, how you grew up here? _Did_ you grow up here?"

A part of Yuuri is still embroiled in slow-growing panic, but a bigger part is listening to the near-frenzied way Victor is shooting questions at him—questions he's never asked before, has always respected the sacredness of. He doesn't doubt that part of his frenzy is avoidance of his own admittances—but there's an undercurrent of genuine need and urgency too, and curse all the heartbroken creatures within Yuuri, he can't bear to ignore it.

"I did," he starts slowly. The line of Victor's body presses harder against his side. "I can't remember how, I—I did grow up in the forest, but I wouldn't be able to tell you how it was different from—from a normal childhood, maybe, I don't know," he hesitates, "It's all I've ever known."

"Did anyone raise you?" Victor murmurs into his skin.

After a pause, Yuuri answers, "Foxes."

Victor hums, the cadence of it low and knowing. Instead of distressing him, it fills Yuuri with relief.

"It's nice," Victor whispers. "You know where you belong."

The drag of his lips against the dip behind Yuuri's collarbone is strangely calming. It lets him say, "Belonging to something isn't always the same thing as being meant for it," like slotting something into place.

He feels Victor swallow. Feels him snake an arm around the back of his waist— _not a deliberate seduction,_ the hard, unyielding grip of it insists, _but like he needs it._

He says, "Tell me more."

And so Yuuri tells him about his childhood fear of the gargantuan chinquapin oaks, how it transformed into solace. He tells him about how long it had taken for the wounds on his feet to heal. He tells him about the one scar still visible on the underside of his toe, how he still looks at it from time to time. He tells him about the first time he tried to dance, the _yukata_ too big on him and slipping under his feet during every turn. He tells him about how he slept up between the tree branches when the monsoons were particularly destructive. He speaks until Victor's head is down in his lap, and continues speaking. He speaks until Victor nuzzles into his thighs and shuts his eyes. He stays like this until his thighs start to burn and his ankles lock up. Still, he doesn't move. He doesn't dare.

He only leans down, tucks Victor's hair aside, and touches his forehead to Victor's temple with all the gentleness Victor couldn't afford.

"You were meant for great things. I promise," he whispers into his ear, and feels like he's given something up without knowing why. 

* * *

This is how Yuuri knows:

He's lounging under a crooked laurel tree, his _obi_ loosened in the fading cold. The wind is gentle with the leaves this time of day, coaxing them to release their balmy aroma into the air. The tree is young and, more importantly, a Birth Tree to many fox cubs. One of them is rustling up into the leaves now, his single tail curling around the branches in spirited little wiggles.

"Careful, Minami-kun," Yuuri calls out, after one particularly energetic rustle.

"I am, I'm being careful," he hears from above.

Yuuri smiles, amused. "Does your mother know you're here?"

A pause. "Maybe," he can hear the pout in his voice, "but she doesn't let me do anything anyway."

Yuuri sighs, "Minami—"

"You know it's not fair! She doesn't even let me watch the dances!" His head pops out of the crown above Yuuri. "Yuuri, can't I come with you? _Please_ , I know I'm ready—!"

"I'm sorry, Minami-kun, but Minako wouldn't let you."

"Then," he looks at Yuuri with wide, pleading eyes, "can I at least watch _you_ dance? You dance alone too, don't you? In the southern caves?"

Yuuri freezes. "I-I'm not—" _alone,_ he almost says.

"I promise I'll be quiet, please, _please_ let me come with you—!"

" _No_ , Minami," he says. It comes firmly, almost vehemently, and Minami quiets. Yuuri doesn't know how to explain Victor to him—doesn't _want_ to, he realizes. Victor is nestled in his palm lines and in the hollows of his throat, has made a home in his lungs and veins. To even say his name aloud to Minami feels intrusive to the point of obscene, like colouring his skin see-through and putting on display the handprints all over his insides.

 _He's_ —Yuuri stops. _Mine_ doesn't sound quite right. _For me._

His eyes are smarting, suddenly. He excuses himself with a mumbled apology, hurries to any place that will hide him away. Vulnerability floods through him, makes him clumsy and sensitive.

 _He's for me,_ Yuuri thinks, and he's crying, crying, crying. 

* * *

"I want to show you something."

He stands, picture-perfect, in a night-black _kimono_ with gold trimming and a perfectly arranged _obi,_ his hair swept back and his eyes lined with red to match the underside of the silk. Minako would be proud.

Victor doesn't speak a word, only brings up a hand to unthinkingly touch the base of his throat—to feel for his lost voice, perhaps. He'd been languorously draped across his boulderstone when Yuuri glided into the cave like this. He doesn't seem to be languorous any longer, sitting on the riverside with a directionless tenseness corded through his muscles. Yuuri doesn't step any closer, doesn't even want to sit himself down.

"Victor," he says, "Victor, are you watching?"

"Yes," Victor says, immediate. He inhales deeply afterwards, as if his voice rose to Yuuri's command and the rest of him wasn't quite ready. There is no _but what will you show me_ , no _why are you dressed like this_ , no praises or witticisms. Anything outside of them—just them, just Yuuri and Victor and the measured distance in between—feels trite.

"Watch me," Yuuri says again, and moves.

The dances of the _kitsune_ are otherworldly things, he knows. They're designed to transform sacredness into sensuality—artfully, with poise and subtlety. Foxes twist and turn to the sounds others can't hear. The secrecy and internalization of their music is what stays with the watchers, that intense, inexplicable itch to enter their world. It prods at his awareness, disguised in the way Victor follows every flutter of his _kimono's_ edge and every slip of his sleeve, searching, unblinking, and Yuuri revels in it. The ecstasy builds in him—has been building, the empty spaces made only to house it. _Watch. Don't look away. Watch._ The thought comes from a primitive want, desperate to be answered. Again; the precise turn of his wrist sends his _kimono_ sleeve sinking down to his elbow. Again; the arch of his spine is deep and beautiful, he knows, _he_ _knows_ , and the stress on his body is nothing at all in comparison. Again; his throat burns, and yet his breaths are steady. _Don't you look away._

He ends it with the slow, step-by-step descent of his foot to the ground—the toes, and then the sole, and then the arch, and then the heel, like sinking into a cloud. Victor watches even this with rapt attention, and every part of Yuuri preens.

"Did you hear it?" he asks, when speaking feels a little less superfluous.

Victor looks at him with a wild sort of understanding. He breathes in and says, "Yes."

"Did you watch me?"

A hint of a smile flickers on his lips, and then flickers out. His every emotion is solely in his eyes, now. "Always, Yuuri."

 _Good,_ Yuuri thinks, fiercely.

The smoke has spread from his lungs to his heart and his gut and his eyes, a fire finally stoked in its wake. It's Victor's. Victor gave him this.

Perhaps that shared heat is felt viscerally by both of them, because Victor says, "You danced for me."

The awe and rapture threaded as one through his voice is such a dear thing, Yuuri has to smile. "I did," he says simply, and thinks back to _I won't dance for you_ and that all-encompassing, life-changing _okay._ Thinks that the Yuuri of autumn, of all the autumns and winters and summers and springs before, had no idea of the difference between 'for' and 'because of'. But he does now—and it's a fist around his heart, a cycle of the same thought. _I did, I did. Let me dance for you, always._

He feels something in his smile go liquid, has to blink once, and twice, and the third time he opens his eyes, Victor's face has crumpled. Not in desolation, or horror—but a certain, exquisite sort of pain nonetheless. He's been fighting, Yuuri knows intrinsically, and has now lost the capacity to do so. The step Yuuri takes in his direction is soundless and compulsive, and all Victor needs to break their godforsaken silence. He bridges the distance in three staccato _clack-clack-clacks_. Everything in Yuuri is waiting, is hung on tenterhooks, and yet he stops only a whisper away.

"I'm," he sighs out. Frames Yuuri's face with his hands. Doesn't touch. "Yuuri, I'm—"

"Don't be," he says. Victor's fingers flex, tilt close and away, close and away. Yuuri slots his own into the spaces between them. He feels, with all his capacity for feeling, the fine tremor of them. Squeezes against it. Pulls them to his cheeks and thinks, _this is mine._

The kiss comes like the most inevitable afterthought; Victor sighing a breath over his eyelashes, Yuuri nuzzling into the side of his face, their mouths brushing in the middle of a pure, single-minded need to be closer and— _oh, there it is,_ says the moment-long pause-and-resume, _there you are._

Yuuri doesn't even notice himself pushing up further, pressing harder, until the seam of his _kimono_ catches on an eroded rock and they go tumbling down. Victor's shocked little grunt is a vibration against his mouth, the way his hands instinctively grip onto Yuuri's waist and the way Yuuri has to widen his thighs to settle safely in his lap feeling, together, like a precious overturn by the universe, a teasing wink that leaves him giggling and laying a flurry of butterfly kisses on Victor's chin and the angle of his jaw.

Victor's grin is breathless—makes Yuuri breathless, too, with how it shifts the skin under his lips. He presses his smile, hard, into Victor's jaw, overwhelmed with giddiness. Can't resist the pinpricks of his barely-grown stubble, and so he changes his smile into a series of lavish kisses. The hitch in Victor's breath is so profoundly lovable; it prompts another kiss at the center of his throat, quick and affectionate. But Victor is tilting his chin up and guiding Yuuri to his lips, saying, "Here, _here_ ," like a man tempted and left to starve.

The second time isn't nearly as innocent. Victor's mouth takes his with a heady persistence, a hard pressure that melds far too persuasively into innocuous nibbles and hints of clever tongue. Yuuri receives it all with possessive surrender, slides his hands from Victor's shoulders into his hair—slowly, sinuously, aware of the way his silken sleeves gather at his elbows and the skin of his forearm grazes the nape of Victor's neck. The hold on his waist, too, reshapes itself in fits and starts, longing held back and released. The protective splay of his hands changes to an iron-grip, and then shifts to his lower back, and then curls all the way around. Yuuri, arching his back blissfully to the weight of it, can't help but open his mouth like a flower in bloom. His sighs and softness are the dew on his petals, and Victor drinks it all up with gusto.

A sharper bite to his lip has Yuuri flinching back on instinct, but Victor only takes the opportunity to shower attention on the stretch of his throat instead. He starts soft, nudging Yuuri's chin up with his nose and laying a precious kiss to the underside of his chin. It's small, and almost absent-minded, and followed immediately by a harsh, open-mouthed press to the place where Yuuri's neck meets his jaw. It's a jolt of sensation, an unexpected shock of heat to a place untouched, and it makes Yuuri gasp and squirm—but he lets him, _of course he lets him_.

He attention is being pulled every which way—to Victor's mouth on his neck, to his hands pulling at his _kimono_ as if its dishevelment gives him some visceral satisfaction, to the spine-rattling shudders that won't stop. He looks up at the roof of their cave, fixes his eyes on the little spots of light he can see through the cracks. They remind Yuuri of his fireflies.

 _They love what you love,_ he remembers.

When Victor comes back to his lips again, he feels a part of himself come unstuck, and breathes, "They would starve for you," into the brush of their mouths.

And Victor doesn't understand, but the cadence of the words breaks through to him. Yuuri feels it in the way he pauses above his mouth, a split-second of naked clarity, and then claims it more fiercely. His pulse is hammering against Yuuri's palm, where it's fitted into the curve of Victor's neck. The feverishness flows between them like something fluid and alive, Yuuri's blood warm and honey-thick, his tongue eager when Victor draws it into his mouth and sucks. Their sighs and grunts and moans, too, feel alive—grow louder and freer without their permission, and inevitably, Yuuri's murmuring, "Victor, _Victor_ ," as soon as Victor pulls away to bite at the shell of his ear.

He finds himself locking his arms tight around Victor's shoulders—tighter, unrelenting—and sighing out, "Don't go."

It's only a wisp of a plea, the vaguest expression of his immediate desire—but it changes the very undercurrent of Victor's touches. He pulls away from Yuuri slowly, painstakingly. His Adam's apple bobs when he tries to speak. Yuuri wants so badly to touch his lips to it again, would soothe it with soft little kisses and a warm tongue, but—

"Wait," Victor rasps, "wait, please."

The 'please' stops him short. His hands on Victor's shoulders clench almost instinctively. Victor covers them with his own.

"Yuuri," he says, the syllables sharp and rough. "Yuuri, I can't."

It cuts through Yuuri's haze with brutal efficiency. He stills, breathing—doing nothing but breathing, for a moment. Feels his heart lurch and his hands tremble, but it feels distant. He says, "What do you mean?" His voice doesn't sound like his own.

"I can't, I have to—" Victor drags in a ragged breath, "Yuuri, please, I _can't_."

"I-I don't understand—"

" _Yuuri_ ," he says again. He says it like it hurts him, like it means the world to him, guarded preciously and covetously behind a wall of flesh until it's cutting into it.

 _How can I believe you when you say my name like that?_ Yuuri thinks. Before he can voice it, Victor grips his hands and pulls them off his shoulders. The sound of dismay at the back of his throat is feeble, choked-off.

He looks at Yuuri for a long moment. Another one of those breaks in time—only, now, it's a terrible mockery. His chest has gone numb, another one, two, ten, countless of his heartbeats killed by Victor's summer-sky eyes and moon-spun hair and honey-smoke voice and wicked mouth.

Victor's hands around his tighten to the point of pain—and then they drop them.

"W-wait," Yuuri tries to say, when he stands and starts walking away. "No, where—where are you going?"

Victor doesn't turn back. Yuuri can't see his face. _I can't even see his eyes,_ he thinks numbly. Nothing else matters; not the hurried stumble in Victor's step, nor the way he holds his arms rigid, nor the tension coiled throughout his body, nor the tremble in his hand when he drags it roughly through his hair—not if Yuuri can't see his eyes.

The dread roiling in his stomach only grows and grows, overshadowing the numbness in a cut-throat sweep of emotion. And yet, for the life of him, Yuuri can't find the bearings to follow. He sits there in disheveled silk, with swollen lips and leaden limbs, and the sight of Victor's back clings to him like a spectre. 

* * *

The next time he comes to their cave, the empty air makes his lungs feel unbearably shriveled. He leaves after feeding the graylings.

Another day; he manages a few twirls and delicate leaps. Victor doesn't come.

He comes back, inexplicably, in the dead of night. _Sode Boshi_ is brilliant from the wide mouth of the cave, and the memory of its beauty over his and Victor's sleeping forms is even more so. His palm lines tingle.

He stays until his lungs are heaving with stale air. Victor's absence is a dead, dead silence in him. He has to close his eyes against the moonlight.

The fireflies don't come for him, either. Perhaps they did starve after all.

**Author's Note:**

> lmao why do I end up making victor do stupid things in my fics idk
> 
> Okay okay okay, before going any further I just want to reiterate that Victor is currently a 16-17 year old child who's grown up believing he has a lot of things to accomplish in the great big world and ends up falling in love at a very inopportune time and in a very inopportune place ok
> 
> If you haven't gotten angry and left yet: thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed that first part; I promise I'm working on the second part and intend to upload it soon-ish. If you guys ever want to ask anything about the fic (or anything else), my tumblr is always open!


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